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My email account sent an email to all my contacts

3 replies

MoetEtPantsOn · 03/02/2013 08:53

Just that really. My yahoo account sent an email with a link that ended in .php to all my contacts. It was entitled Hi. It's not in my sent items and I wasn't using yahoo at the time. Just found out when i started receiving a million out of offices and then emails from people telling me about it.

I've run a virus scan on my laptop which looks ok and have changed my email password. Have set Facebook status to say not to open that email.

Is there anything else I should be doing? Yahoo automatically adds everyone to your contacts so it's gone to gazillions of people. Old eBay sellers and buyers, old bosses from years ago, the works. Also does anyone know what might have caused it? Thanks in advance.

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niceguy2 · 03/02/2013 09:04

Given Yahoo is a webmail product I guess that someone managed to hack your account and send the message that way.

I'd suggest making sure your password is not a standard word and is at least 8 characters long and contains at least one uppercase, lowercase and a number. I also sometimes include a random character at the end like ! just to make it harder for people to guess. So for example Passw0rd! (obviously I don't use the word password lol)

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PlentyOfPubeGardens · 03/02/2013 09:11

This happened to me once on Hotmail and I've had similar emails from other people's accounts. It's quite common. Hotmail now has a 'my friend's account has been hacked' button for reporting the emails.

Change your password and to be extra safe, any passwords for accounts associated with that email (paypal? amazon? MN?). When it happened to me, nothing else bad happened afterwards, it was just deeply embarrassing.

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MoetEtPantsOn · 03/02/2013 09:19

Thanks for the responses. I get at least two a year from people's hotmail accounts and just delete them. Now that I'm the sender I'm getting all kinds of people coming out of the woodwork asking what to do, how it happened etc. I will change all my passwords. Thanks for the tips.

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